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Facebook is bad for students.

This conclusion was drawn when Muslim clerics from Islamic boarding schools, or pesantren , from across Java and Madura islands convened on Thursday.

The clerics were seeking the best way to deal with the rising popularity of social networking sites like Facebook, which they believed disturbed learning activities and threatened to change how male and female students interacted. Gus An’im, spokesman for Lirboyo pesantren in Kediri, East Java, which hosted the meeting, said that the clerics had noted a recent decrease in students’ concentration, believed to be caused by spending too much time on the wildly popular site.

“We are very concerned about our students as they tend to spend more time on Facebook,” An’im said. “It totally disturbs their concentration. We have to control them, especially those under 17.”

An’im said that the social network had also changed behavior between male and female students in the pesantren, normally staid, traditional institutions where separation between boys and girls was the norm. He said that Facebook encouraged students to flirt and this could lead to sinful lust.

“The impact on male and female students is not good as they can now flirt with each other. This may lead to a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship as they are able to chat as well as show their pictures online to everyone,” he said. However, An’im said that the clerics did not aim to ban Facebook in pesantren across Java and Madura.

“Our discussion only underlines the bad effects of Facebook that may lead to students being unproductive in their studies and the sin caused by chatting, flirting and exchanging photos online,” he said.

“Banning Facebook is not likely to solve the problem and we are not sure whether it is going to be an effective way or not,” he said, without elaborating.

Separately, Amidhan, head of the Indonesian Council of Ulema (MUI), said that the Internet and social networking sites could be beneficial or bad depending on how they were used. “We will never ban the use of the Internet as it can enrich our knowledge and have a good impact on Muslims,” Amidhan said. “The problems occur when people use this media in a careless way, such as creating porn sites.”

Citing his 7-year-old grandson who already has a Facebook profile as an example, Amidhan said that “it is the parents’ job to monitor him” when online.

Facebook recently said that Indonesia, with a population of about 222 million, has outpaced China and India in terms of user growth. In 2008, the number of Facebook users in the country soared by 645 percent to 831,000.

Facebook is the top-ranked site in Indonesia, ahead of search engines Yahoo and Google, according to Alexa.com, which tracks Internet traffic. Nearly 4 percent of all Facebook visitors are from Indonesia, making it the largest source of visitors after the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Italy.